This disclosure relates to a system and method for maintaining contact list information for electronic communications.
The number of different ways people can communicate electronically continues to multiply. Communications can be conducted through, for example, dial-up or push-to-talk voice calls, through electronic mail, or through text messaging. Each of these types of communications, moreover, may be conducted using different networks or protocols, and any individual may make use of more than one of those networks and protocols. For example, it would not be unheard of for an individual to have a mobile telephone, a POTS (“plain old telephone system”) telephone, and an Internet-based telephone, a Microsoft Exchange email account for work, a Web-based email account for non-work messages, and AOL and .NET instant messaging applications. As the number of different ways to contact individuals increases, the difficulty of keeping track of those individuals' contact information also increases.
When individuals are collected into various group lists, contact lists, and buddy lists, the difficulty of keeping these lists updated and relevant is compounded by the fact that the named individuals can often be contacted through any one or more of various networks and services, such as those described above. For example, a work-related email contact list may be updated regularly by in-house IT staff, but at various times throughout the day or week, some individuals in the contact list may best be contacted not through their work email accounts, but rather through other networks or services that do not feature a regularly-updated contact list.
This can be true even where multiple services are offered by a single device, as can be the case for a wireless device such as a mobile telephone. Even on a single device, each one of the multiple communication services offered through the device is often enabled by its own application program. Each of these application programs may maintain a contact list of its own that may or may not be shared with other communication applications.
Keeping track of contacts becomes even more challenging when a user relies on multiple devices to keep in communication. For example, a user may keep a text messaging and/or email applications on his wireless device and on his desktop computer. The user may even use the same email and/or instant messaging account to communicate both at the desktop and the wireless device, but contact lists on the desktop and on the wireless device can diverge if they are not synchronized.
At least one available communication service, the ICQ instant messaging service, assists users in keeping track of instant messaging contact lists by offering a server-side contact list. See, e.g., R, Parviainen, “Mobile Instant Messaging,” available at http://www.cdt.luth.sek-rolle/docs/ict2003/mim.html.
The Trillian instant messaging client is a chat client that supports several different chat services, and that incorporates contacts from each of the supported chat media into a single contact list. See Trillian Online User Manual, available at http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/support/manual.php.